IE9 User? You’ll Love ‘Pinning’ Your Blog

September 17, 2010

Joy Victory

If you use the new Internet Explorer 9 beta (IE9) on Windows 7 and have a blog on WordPress.com, you should definitely check out some cool new features.

First, not only do the charts on your stats page load faster — thanks to new canvas element support in IE9 — but each WordPress.com site also includes a high-res icon for your browser, taskbar, or shortcuts. Once you start using IE9, you’ll find this icon comes in handy when you want to “pin” a blog.

Pinning? Yes, Pinning!

Wait, just what is pinning, you may be asking? It’s actually quite simple and a lot like bookmarking but on your computer instead of in the browser. Once pinned, you can launch your blog right from your Windows taskbar. A handy context menu lets you access some of your most common tasks such as adding a new post or moderating comments, with a single click. You also can pin a friend’s blog to stay up-to-date on their latest posts.

To get started, the first thing you need to do is download Internet Explorer 9 while using Windows 7. Let’s take a look at how things unfold from there:

Pinning Your Blog

When you sign in to your blog, you can pin your own site and get extra tasks that make blogging easier and faster. A logged-in user can quickly access links to their dashboard to write a new post, moderate comments, upload a new file, or view blog statistics. (Each task only appears if the user has that task’s capability, such as site administrator’s.) A custom list also displays up to 5 latest posts for the current blog context.

You can pin someone else’s blog, too. When you do, an icon appears that lets you subscribe to the blog feed, signup for a free blog, read Freshly Pressed, and access WordPress.com Support and forums.

How to Pin

This is simple: Just visit a blog in a IE9 tab, grab the tab, and drop it onto the taskbar at the bottom of your desktop. When you pin a site it will either show up as a large WordPress logo or as your own Blavatar if you’ve uploaded one.

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Seems pretty cool, will try out once we get IE9 at work (since we just got IE7 I expect it will be a while). Unfortunately for home/personal use, I’m a mac user and there’s no IE for Mac so I can’t try these out 😦

Ok. Great post. But I’m not in big love with IE9 nor do I like the way WordPress.com is *indirectly* promoting IE9 by firstly putting it on the front page tagging as Sponsored Post and now promoting it from its official blog.

But I believe even Google begins to promote IE9, people will not roll back to that thing anymore, at least as long there is Firefox and Chrome [I have bad experience with Chrome though. But many people find it very useful.]

It’s a nice feature but I keep finding IE9 starts fast and looks impressive, then slows down and becomes unresponsive and unreliable after about an hour or so of use. Unfortunately, though, since the launch of IE9 I’ve found that WordPress has become unreliable in my browser of choice, Google Chrome, where before it worked perfectly fine…!

Some great features – personally will be sticking to Google Chrome though as it seems to be about the fastest and also has some fantastic features. I would recommend trying it out. Opera’s also very good. I think it’s a shame that a lot of people don’t even realise there are other browsers out there and a few that are as good if not better than IE in my opinion. Great article though – thanks for sharing.

Been playing with the pinning with IE9 Beta and Win7, however I’ve noticed that although the dashboard for WordPress loads faster, the actual main post window has an issue with accepting and saving text. Had to turn on compatability mode to workaround this.

This is ‘nifty’, but I wouldn’t say it was ‘awesome’. You can do something similar using Google Chrome – simply navigate to your blog, then from the options menu select tools then create application shortcuts… and you’ll be given an option to pin your blog to the Win 7 taskbar. It’ll even sit in its own standalone window, rather than just opening in the browser as it does in IE9. I use this for my GMail account, which gives me a ‘standalone’ e-mail application without having to run Outlook or similar.

I’ll grant, this doesn’t give you some of the menu options such as accessing browser stats etc., but you’re only one click away from them anyway.

You know what would be aweeeesome? The possibility of creating short posts right from the jumplist. Not sure if win7’s taskbar capabilities go that far tho. Still good thing you’re working with IE9, looks like a fine browser.

@monica – it’s not quite the same, but you can ‘pin’ your WordPress blog using Chrome. Click the ‘spanner’ while you’ve got your blog open, go to Tools and then click Create Application Shortcuts.

This’ll make your blog in to its own ‘application’, which you can then pin in Win 7’s task bar. You won’t get quite the functionality that seems to work with IE9, like clicking straight to stats etc., but it’s very useful and what I use. Especially as, for some reason, I can’t write in my blog using IE9…